Talk:E. H. Hurst

[Sorry, must run -- I hope someone else can pick up this stub. Here are some notes and links, please feel free to draw on these. Tks. DBrnstn (talk) 14:44, 12 March 2008 (UTC)]

Untitled
http://books.google.com/books?id=QReZh6r_iFkC&pg=PA103&lpg=PA103&dq=%22e.h.+hurst%22&source=web&ots=yrBztgPny5&sig=cFn0YCZMvkUfoNQIOHD3RWBcrac&hl=en We Shall Overcome, By Herb Boyd

Robert Moses, head of SNCC, and others were accosted by a group of white men, while trying to register black voters in August 1961. Moses was repeatedly struck in the head by Billy Jack Caston, son-in-law of E.H. Hurst (and cousin of the local sheriff), leaving Moses semi-unconscious.

Hurst invited Lee to meet at a cotton gin. Hurst jumped from his truck brandishing a .38 pistol, and pointed it at Lee. Lee refused to acknowledge Hurst until he put the pistol down. At first it appeared Hurst would comply, but the angry Hurst instead shot Lee just above the ear. There were a dozen people at the gin. Hurst claimed self-defense and was never charged with murder.

http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/oh_freedom/story4.html Herbert Lee, a black dairy farmer and NAACP member near the south Mississippi town of Liberty, was one of the first to join SNCC's voter registration efforts. Lee lived across the road from his state representative, E.H. Hurst. "In 1961, you know you're talking about a white state legislator," says Michael Sayer, a white New Yorker who was on the SNCC staff in the early 1960's.

Hurst and Lee "had grown up across the road from each other ... and they were friends," Sayer stresses. "They broke bread together ... their children played together." The friendship illustrates that segregation was not an expression of racial hatred, Sayer argues. It was a strictly enforced division of power.

"When Herbert Lee got involved in the voter registration in 1961, he stepped across this cultural divide. And E.H. Hurst invited Herbert Lee to see him down at the cotton gin, and he assassinated Herbert Lee," Sayer says.

Hurst claimed he'd shot Lee in self-defense. An all-white jury acquitted him—a typical verdict when white Southerners killed black ones.

"Really, it's the brutalizing of a people, and these deaths are sort of the ultimate forms of that," says Bob Moses, who was the cerebral and morally forceful leader of SNCC's Mississippi campaign in the early 1960s. He was in his mid-20s; that made him an elder in the movement. After growing up in Harlem, Moses had completed his master's degree in philosophy at Harvard, and taught high school mathematics for a couple of years before joining SNCC. Besides numerous beatings and jailings for his civil rights efforts, Moses survived a drive-by murder attempt in early 1963.

On September 25, 1961, Herbert Lee, a 52-year-old farmer and father of nine who had attempted to register to vote, was shot and killed by E.H. Hurst, a white member of the state legislature from the ironically named Liberty, Mississippi. The sheriff and others intimidated black witnesses to testify that Lee had threatened Hurst with a tire iron. Hurst was acquitted on the same day he killed Lee in an Amite County courtroom brimful of armed white men.

One of the black witnesses, Lewis Allen, later said he had lied to protect himself and his family. He was soon being harassed by the police. Three weeks after Lee was murdered, Allen was blasted to death with buckshot in his driveway.


 * No, this is incorrect. Although he was harassed, Allen was not killed until 1964, the night before he intended to move north. He had stayed in Liberty to help his aging parents, who had died.Parkwells (talk) 14:44, 15 December 2018 (UTC)

http://books.google.com/books?id=-uP-a_4v6H4C&pg=PA86&lpg=PA86&dq=%22eh+hurst%22&source=web&ots=H2Ze8b1QCe&sig=dI1Tl0r4twvLUk4StLI7_wIIYB8&hl=en Ballad of Herbert Lee

Boy this needs work!!
I appreciate the racism involved, but want to caution people that this is not really a biography page of Hurst, so much as a sideways telling of the shooting, inquest, death of Allen and Evers etc.

The story here is really about the killing of Lee and inquest. Please - people with the sources, take the time to write a proper article that we can all help edit. Check out other biographies, and fill this out.

Anything worth doing, is worth doing right. Thanks BB  184.69.174.194 (talk) 04:17, 15 January 2019 (UTC)
 * this person is mostly notable as a murderer, so the fact that the murder, trial, aftermath etc. makes up most of the page. this, makes perfect sense. most other mississippi house of representative members from 1961 do not have wikipedia pages, and i doubt they would pass WP:N. the fact that the anon appreciates "the racism involved" is irrelevant. as to the anon's instruction to "check out other bios", compare with other reps to same house, e.g., Donnie Bell. קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 23:29, 15 January 2019 (UTC)